The visit of gratitude

In 2001, Martin Seligman, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, began to notice the emotional burden of decades of research into depression and mental illness. He felt that the professional approach based on trying to cure trauma was imbuing him with a certain sadness. This led him to reflect on psychological therapies, often so focused on repairing harm that they forget to inject us with a good dose of optimism that makes us face life with more enthusiasm and joy. Seligman had just been elected president of the American Psychological Association and paved the way in a new direction: the so-called positive psychology. He wanted to study, scientifically, what the mechanisms are that make us feel that life is worth living. He did not intend to build any abstract theory but to establish effective behaviors that could be tested and measured. In 2005, Seligman and his research team recruited four hundred and eleven volunteers and divided them into five groups. One group would make a list of positive memories, another would identify their personal strengths. A third group would introduce small specified changes in their daily lives and a fourth would limit themselves to describing childhood memories. The fifth group would undertake a more elaborate task: they would write a letter of gratitude to someone important in their life, someone to whom they had not properly thanked. Afterwards, they would call them by phone, arrange to meet without explaining the reason, and once they had the person in front of them, they would read the letter aloud. It could not be a card with a meager “thanks for everything” to get it over with. The letter had to be about three hundred words long and specify the reasons for the gratitude, the details of that event, and how that person's gesture had changed their life. They named this exercise the gratitude visit.

Seligman and his team asked the four hundred and eleven volunteers to assess their happiness levels before the experiment, immediately after, and after one month. More or less, everyone perceived some improvement. But one group noticed unusually superior effects to the rest: that of the gratitude visit. The researchers were fascinated by the impact of that test compared to the others. Participants felt an immediate increase in their happiness. As the weeks passed, however, the intensity gradually faded. After six months, the effect had vanished, returning to initial happiness levels. Seligman attributed this to the so-called hedonic treadmill, or in other words: that we get used to everything and always return to the starting point. The same mechanisms that help us overcome hardship also prevent us from settling into perennial happiness. The study concluded that expressing gratitude was a clear generator of happiness, but it had to be repeated periodically to sustain that state of mind. They advised repeating the exercise every six weeks (it is understood that thanking different people, of course). Years later, a team of neuroscientists confirmed the results with brain scans: people who had written gratitude letters showed, three months later, higher activation in the medial prefrontal cortex, the area associated with empathy and decision-making. It was as if the brain were more predisposed to experiencing that happiness. One can be more or less skeptical about the result, but in any case, it is easy to verify. Rate your happiness from 0 to 100, scrupulously follow the gratitude visit protocol, and after reading the letter aloud to whomever you consider, re-rate your happiness. If you don't notice any change, at least you will surely have made the other person happy.